Today we are talking about aligning yourself and your body with food.

Hi there everyone!

As a human, your body is designed to become and stay aligned. Isn’t it amazing, all of the things your body does for you each day without you having to DO anything? The best thing you can do is learn how to get your body aligned to stay in as optimal health as possible.

As one of the four things you need to survive, food is obviously essential. The main way to get your body aligned with food is to start listening to it. One of my favorite quotes by Norman brown is “What is always speaking silently is the body.” Today you are going to learn how to listen to your body.

What does listening to your body mean? It means paying attention to what your body is trying to tell you by noticing your aches and pains, patterns of when or why they occur, how you feel after eating food, how you feel after doing certain exercise and when you should rest because you’re run down.

Pain or discomfort is just one of the ways your body sends you a message that something isn’t right. Just think of how many people are living with pain each and every day but either choose to ignore it, blindly think it will go away OR think some level of pain is normal? I’m here to tell you, living with pain is not normal. The same goes for sickness and disease. Living with it is NOT normal. Let me give you an example of how this played out in my life.

A few years ago, I started noticing that I would get a headache every time I ate ice cream. I’m talking like an instant headache, most of the time before I had even finished eating the ice cream. Honestly, I love ice cream so much, I chose to ignore it. I mean who doesn’t want to eat ice cream?

So this probably played out for over a year before I started noticing the headaches were getting worse and I would also feel really tired for awhile after eating ice cream. I started to think to myself, maybe I shouldn’t eat ice cream. Ding, ding, ding! But my love for ice cream prevailed again and I ignored my body!

Another string of events happening around the same time led me to get some food sensitivity testing and while the results were quite surprising, it helped explain some of what I was experiencing. Lo and behold, I was sensitive to dairy and sugar! No wonder my body was experiencing this immediate effect! Luckily I found out a few other things I was sensitive to that were causing me problems as well. At that moment, I realized all this time, my body was trying to tell me something. I decided right then and there to start paying attention to my body.

As I made further dietary and lifestyle changes, I was amazed at how much my body told me about how it was operating.

Listening to your body requires effort and time. In essence you are becoming friends with someone new, except you’ve been together your whole life. You need to learn how to recognize when your body is trying to tell you important things. I’ve heard countless people talk about eating at a restaurant where they had a steak and didn’t feel good later. The assumption is “that must have been a bad steak”. When in reality, it is more likely your body doesn’t process red meat well. Or in the morning when you wake up with brain fog. That’s a message to you that you didn’t get enough sleep the night before. There are literally thousands of messages from our bodies EACH AND EVERY DAY.

Think of the chronic diseases we could manage naturally if we just listened to our body: Auto-immune diseases,Type II Diabetes, Heart disease, Thyroid disorders, high cholesterol and many more!

Let’s take the next step and get YOU learning how to listen to your body. Try this one thing over the next week and see what you learn. It will be worth it, I promise!

For one week, keep a diary, either in a notebook, on scratch paper, your computer, your phone, really it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Studies show that things sink in more when we write them down. I want you to pay attention to your body.

It will take a bit of discipline to
a.) Slow down and take a minute to think and
b.) Remember to pay attention to yourself after certain events.

1. Write down how you feel when you wake up in the morning. Are you jumping out of bed, ready to take on the day, or are you hitting the snooze button too many times? Make a note of how many hours you slept, what time you went to sleep and what you did during the hour before going to sleep (read, watch TV, check email, read on your iPad, exercise, eat, etc.)

2. Write down how you feel within one hour after eating. Good, bad or just OK. Make a quick note of what you ate at your meal. I also want you to write down if you ate breakfast or not. Please note when you started feeling hungry again, mid-morning, just before lunch, etc. Were you “hangry” (hungry and angry) or just mildly hungry?

3. Record how you feel after being stressed. Does your heart beat faster, do you have to run to the bathroom because of an upset stomach, do you want to reach right for the candy or binge on some potato chips, etc.

4. At the end of the week, take note of some patterns that evolved over the week. You may even notice some before the week is up.

Do this for one week. I know it sounds like a lot but it’s only seven days and I have faith in you!

Happy listening!?